Best Software Testing, Quality Assurance QA Books: Top recommended

Without a doubt, there are evidently a lot of best Quality Assurance and Software Testing books out there. These QA books and Software Testing books vary greatly in length, depth and coverage of the subject. Here you'll find the best QA books for tester of all levels - from just beginners to seasoned test expert. Each book approaches the testing methodology from a different point of view, and in my opinion are must read for every QA Engineer or Software Tester who wants to learn the basics or improve already existing skills. It is hard to select the best book, because some books have the introductory level and describe the fundamentals of software testing, while others explore the advanced topics. Here are the top QA and Software Testing books.

How Google Tests Software

How Google Tests Software book presents diverse insight into Google approaches and methodologies for software testing Google. Engineering Director James Whittaker and two Google testing experts have teamed up to outline best practices for testing and delivering software at scale based on personal trails and errors in Google.

The authors describe the life of Software Engineers in Test and Test Engineers at Google and how the company blends development and testing together. The book will explain the benefits of breaking down types of testing into three broad categories that include both manual and automated testing and how the selection of manual or automated testing depends on what is being tested. The reader would get a solid foundation for making decision about proper testing infrastructure, timely code reviews, organizing staging environments, deploying software with continuous builds and configuring production monitoring.

How Google Tests Software book provides perspectives on the application of Google proven approaches with a nice balance of stories, process, and test techniques. The book will help QA Testers become more effective and more efficient in testing endeavors. In case you dream to work as QA Tester for Google, I would recommend to get this book together with The Google Resume book. In this case one book will help you to improve your QA skills, while another would help to polish your resume and prepare for Google interview.

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The Google Resume: How to Prepare for a Career and Land a Job at Apple, Microsoft, Google, or any Top Tech Company

You have QA skills and you have QA experience, but how to get hired? Gayle Laakmann wrote this book based on her lead interviewer, member of Google's Hiring Committee experience. She reviewed thousands job applications, evaluated thousands of resumes and interviewed hundreds candidates for Apple, Microsoft and Google. As result she wrote a book which demystifies the process of preparation for an interview, creation cover letter and resume, negotiating an offer and finally landing a job in high tech company. After reading this book you may finally realize how many mistakes you did while searching job last time. The author will definitely help you to understand, from the inside out, how the hiring process in Google, Microsoft and Apple works and what it takes to get hired. I would absolutely recommend this book to anyone who want to grow the interviewing skills and to land for a job in any technology company.

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Experiences of Test Automation: Case Studies of Software Test Automation

The book contains twenty eight unique case studies from QA Testers responsible for test automation. You can start reading the book from any chapter, but eventually I recommend to read them all. Most likely you already know that successful and effective testing is difficult to achieve. The book helps to understand the principles of effective test automation based on the real life stories and it gives the knowledge to help avoid the test automation pitfalls. The test automation is described for various environments and platforms; the book covers HP QTP, JUnit, EggPlant, JMeter, Nagios, Eclipse, Selenium, Watir and many other commercial and open source tools used in Waterfall and Agile development projects. The experiences of test automation covered in this book incorporate both pain and pride, both failure and success, both sparkling ideas and astonishing decisions. Read to the stories and heed what the chapter authors have learned, and your own practice of test automation is more likely to be triumphant.

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I am a Bug

Written by software professional Robert Sabourin, and illustrated by his daughter Catherine, this book is one of the best beginner’s introductions to software testing. I bought this wise book several years ago and make every software tester who works for me read it. The book is a serious testing book, smartly camouflaged as a children’s book, This book is great for explaining software testing on the visual way to children, interns, software developers, managers and executives. If you are absolutely new to testing and you are looking for a book to study from in order to prepare for a job interview, this is the best book.

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How to Reduce the Cost of Software Testing

This book is about reducing the cost of software testing, written from the perspective of the testers and written by test leaders, best paper authors, and keynote speakers from many different industries and from different countries. The series of essays are polished by a software process naturalist and consulting software tester - Matthew Heusser and Project Management Professional (PMP), Certified Quality Auditor (CQA) - Govind Kulkarni. The book identifies the costs of software testing, costs of starting testing team and budgeting, provides helpful tips that testers can adapt to their work to reduce the costs, explains how to remove bottlenecks in the software testing process, helps to set up a process for tracking defects and issues efficiently and effectively. The most important part of the book is the final chapter "25 Tips to Reduce Testing Today" with detailed explanation of the methods that QA Team can use to get to work cutting costs right now.

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Lessons Learned in Software Testing

The book offers nearly 300 lessons the authors found out during their many years of solide software testing experience. This book is recommended for professionals who tests software and for software developers, managers, and executives who have to work with testers. The best way to read this book is to flip through it, rather than trying to read it from first to last page. You will find this book a useful source of ideas for testing and managing testing team. If you get this book now you would do a much better job in the future. A few of the best lessons for me are “Lesson 36: Don't confuse the test with the testing”, “Lesson 57: "Make your bug report an effective sales tool.", ”Lesson 110: Automated regression tests find a minority of the bugs”, “Lesson 146: Don't use the IEEE Standard 829” and “Lesson 263: Ask questions during job interviews”

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Beautiful Testing: Leading Professionals Reveal How They Improve Software

The wonderful collection of 23 essays from 27 leading software testers and developers contains loads of hints about testing. The book is divided into three parts: "Beautiful Testers" covers the human aspects of testing, "Beautiful Process" is the largest section and explains the testing process, "Beautiful Tools" concludes with tools that help testers do test more effectively. After reading this book I picked up and applied a large number of great improvement and software testing tools useful for my daily work. This is one of the best books on testing I have read this year, and it is absolutely worth adding this book to your shelf.

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Software Testing Interview Questions You'll Most Likely Be Asked

QA Testers often get prepared for a technical interview by reverse engineering the most frequently asked interview questions found online. It generally works well, but what if software tester does not want to spent several hours going through the low quality web sites containing useless interview questions and only occasionally discovering the real jewels. Even in case QA Engineer found a few promising web sites, there is still a need to compile the question together, print them out for quality assurance interview preparation, and there is still no guarantee that all regular interview topics are covered. Software Testing Interview Questions You'll Most Likely Be Asked book is an excellent introduction to interview preparation. It covers all the typical testing interview topics like general testing concepts, types of testing, test and project management, software development process and test automation. It provides 200 software testing interview questions and 51 HR interview questions with specific and impressive answers that helps nail test interview. This book is great for those QA Testers that have solid working experience, but are a bit rusty on some of quality assurance definitions. The books is also great for newbies who has no real life experience, and for seasoned professionals who have been out of the software market for a while.

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As you may have surmised, the top QA books list has at least one book that every tester have to buy, read and own. All these suggested software testing books give specific tips and trick for beautiful testing, provide a thorough foundation for improving of software testing and get the testers heads straight.